


(i'll only hurt you) if you let me

by makeashadow_ao3



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, Near Death, it had so much potential ya know, it's a shame the punisher didn't get a second season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 19:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17514263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makeashadow_ao3/pseuds/makeashadow_ao3
Summary: Here are the facts: Billy Russo is dying. There is an ambulance five minutes from his location. Frank Castle is also five minutes out. Maybe they’ll get here in time but who "they" are is anyone’s guess.





	(i'll only hurt you) if you let me

**Author's Note:**

> i'm upset. and this is what came out - instead of all the filthy hate-sex billy and dinah should've been having. huh. ah well, title from billy eilish's "when the party's over"

_(i’ll only hurt you) if you let me_

 

“Curt? Curtis, here! I knew you’d come!”

Heels clack against the untreated hardwood floor of the basement. It accompanies the dying man’s gurgling, blood bubbling up his throat and coating his tongue in thick crimson. She tries not to wince as she drops to her haunches in front of him but even in his bleary daze he clocks the pain skittering across her face.

Gone is the man who doned suits for lunch meetings, the one they called _a beaut._ This one is banged up and bruised in a hoodie and soiled jeans. “You look like shit.”

“Curtis call you?” He jerks, involuntarily bites at air, his teeth gnashing as the fever coursing through his body. He’s slumped against the wall, legs splayed across the floor. He’s slept in worse positions, but this shit sucks. Heart racing to try and preserve life, blood leaks through his fingers and it’s a wonder he hasn’t bleed out completely. Not after that asshole robbed him and tossed him in the dumpster. Not after his trek to this, possibly his final resting place.

Billy’s thought a lot about mortality. There’s nothing he loves more than war, so death is inevitable. Not even the good doctor could shake that impulse loose. But he imagined Curtis - or _Frank_ \- there with him at the end. If it had to end like this.... Yeah, it should be those two. Instead, Dinah Madani washes eyes so hot they almost burn blue over his shivering form. “I got you good, didn't I?”

Those hot coals rove over his long torso, pinpointing each of the three exacting shots with the strongest urge to touch them, plunge her fingers into the weeping holes. It’s the same instinct she had when she first saw his scars. He slept in his mask after the bandages were removed and she never had the luck of catching him without it when he was still locked up at Metro General. But seeing him standing tall in her new apartment… She expected ugly. She prayed for grotesque. But he was still _pretty_ , so she wanted to stride over to him, perch on her toes, and dig her fingertips in to widen the healed fissures. Make ‘em bleed.

While she observes his deterioration, he observes her. The chestnut ringlets shrouding her features and shading her amber eyes, her tawny complexion and gold necklace with its Hamsa etching resting on her chest, the scratches and serrated skin sealed together with white bandages and prayer. He should rip her back open for what she did. “Krista?”

Her nostrils flare and eyes shoot up to meet his, black as void. Sweat sheens across his forehead as if breathing is a tall order and for him, right now, it is. She lies. “Dead.”

Billy’s jaw clenches and he sucks his teeth, averts his gaze away. Dinah’s persistent, though. “She died on that sidewalk. You left her to die, Billy.”

“I ain’t the one who pushed her out the window, am I?” The words and his glare bite but then he descends into manic laughter that turns into a coughing fit accompanied by bloody spittle. He smells like decay and this is getting a little macabre even for her.

“You two were going to run away together. Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And let Castle live?”

“I was done fighting Frankie.”

“Why? Executing three innocent women just to teach Castle a lesson take too much out of you?”

He can’t meet her prying eyes and try as he might he has no strength to push himself upwards. He doesn’t like this, her towering over him while he expires. He always had height to his advantage and she liked it - or so he assumes.

“You didn’t kill me.” Not a question. “After you choked me… You could’ve shot me before you tucked your tail between your legs and ran out of your girlfriend’s apartment like a coward. Why didn’t you?”

“What’s the point? You here to nag me to death, that it? This is what you want?”

“I want you to remember what you did to me. I want you to look me in the eye and own up to how you used me, spied on me, slit my partner’s throat and then washed his blood off my face…” she falters, rage and despair and desire flaring at the memory. “You shot me and I _lived_ and I’m going to make sure you rot in a jail cell if it’s the last thing I do.”

A laugh or a death rattle, it’s hard to tell which, racks his body. “You got a fixation, lady. You might wanna talk to someone about that.”

“Someone like who? Like the woman whose brains got splattered on the sidewalk last night?” Right now, Doctor Krista Dumont is alive and conscious with bars in her arms and a broken spine, but who knows for how much longer. Once Frank Castle finds out it was her who inspired Billy to stage the three dead women at the warehouse. She might wish she were dead. But truthfully, Dinah can’t help herself. She’s got to push him because the pieces should’ve fit together by now. There’s no way the last few years are completely lost to him.

A snarl rips through Billy at her goading and she gets it. That warm satisfaction in her lower back, her belly, between her denim clad legs open to his gaze if he’d look. If he cared. “Why didn’t you kill me? Why not take the shot?”

“Apparently I did.” His eyes hone in on the topographical strawberry scar at her hairline.

This is going nowhere and she’s running out of time. They both are. “Frank Castle is on his way. So is an ambulance and the cops, but I think one will get here quicker than the other. You might as well tell me while you’re still breathing.”

He laughs and this is a sorrowful whine. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t _know_ you, Madani. You’re some black words on a white page in a file folder. There’s nothing up here, okay? No one’s home.”

“Bullshit! You’re lying.” She punches his shoulder in aggravation and he’s confused by the action. It jars him, his insides rattling, but it’s not a hateful jab. It’s purposeful. Like she wants this to _mean_ something. The manipulation and the blood and piles of bodies. He can’t die here without it mattering. There has to be a reason they crossed paths and he sought her out, made her his mark only to toss her away.

“You jealous, Dinah? Mad I found a new playtoy?”

“Other way around, don’t you think? Dumont had her hooks in you pretty deep. She didn’t want to save you. She wanted to save her father. Textbook case of daddy issues if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.” He winces with an inhale and shifts. He doesn’t want to think about Krista. She wasn’t his chance at real freedom but the crazy bird was an escape hatch.

“She didn’t help you regain your memories. She just filled in your gaps with what she wanted. Krista Dumont used you, Billy.”

“And what would you have done, huh? Stand at the foot of my bed every night with scotch on your breath?” She flinches because she swore he was asleep those times. She always wished he’d wake and face her but he never did. “Yeah, I knew you were there.”

She pushes again. “Castle must’ve really scrambled your head. The Billy Russo I knew would’ve been fascinated by the security agent obsessed with him. He definitely would’ve come looking for answers a lot sooner and from someone who could actually give them to him.”

“I’ll admit I’m flattered.”

Not good enough. “Clock’s ticking, Billy.”

“Lemme ask you something, _Agent_. You got three rounds in me. But none in the head? What, you like the idea of me bleeding all over New York? No… I think you like me too much to kill me. Kinda like how I can’t seem to kill you. Allegedly.”

She cants her jaw to the side and narrows her gaze. In the short time Billy Russo has been in her life, he’s had multiple chances to kill her. Every opportunity he had his finger on a trigger is a number that’s higher than she likes. Does he remember or is this more of the doctor’s machinations? Not everything is in a file.

“ _Tell me._ ”

He coughs into his fist and pulls back to find a pulp of blood so thick and dark it’s almost black. He cracks a smile full of cherry red teeth. “Goddamn.”

Before Dinah can capture his attention again, there’s stomping and metal creaking coming up behind her and a paramedic pushes her out of the way to get to the injured man. They pay her no mind while hoisting him up and strapping him to the gurney, injecting him with fluids, and applying pressure to his wounds.

Dinah tucks close to his side all the while. “Castle’s on his way and I can guarantee he won’t let that ambulance make it to the hospital,” she grits by his ear. “Last chance, Billy…”

“I’ve got nothing for you, Madani. If it didn’t come back by now, it’s poof! Gone.” He turns his head away from her and coughs, globs of blood speckling the sheet on the stretcher. His head lolls back to her side and his vision goes double, so he focuses on one of the slight, brown ladies who can’t be ripped away from him. “But keep at it. Maybe one of these times something will shake loose.”

She follows them to the ambulance, cites herself as the arresting officer for Billy Russo, criminal at large, so she can ride in the back. He passes out on the ride to Metro General, and as hard as she argues they won’t let her into the operating room where she can keep an eye on him.

  


 

She bites her nails as she watches the surgery go into its third hour from the private observation deck. Curtis steps beside her and holds out a paper cup of coffee. She takes it. “How’d you know? I can’t imagine Frank called you after I called him.”

“He didn’t need to.” A silence stretches between them and she fills it with a confession. “You were a person of interest when Russo broke out of the hospital. He could’ve contacted you again, but you weren’t exactly using your apartment.”

The veteran swallows the knowledge that he can add privacy to the list of things he’s lost due to Madani, Castle, and Russo’s war. Resigned, he shakes his head. “Should’ve let Frank put him down.”

“You keep saying that.”

“And I mean it.” He stills her with his stern yet empathetic dark eyes. “Sometimes you have to put an animal out of its misery.”

“Yeah, well. It wouldn’t put me out of mine.”

**Author's Note:**

> i really cannot believe i gave thirteen hours of my life to get shafted like this. and it's not even the shaft i wanted!


End file.
